This is the problem that brought me to webmaster talk - I'm not too clever at working out things like this:
Yesterday, my site was showing nothing but a 'page error' message all evening - until I found and removed an htaccess file. I haven't come across one of these before but, Googling it, found it was an 'authentication device'. I emailed the support service at the host and was told it was 'probably automatically generated'. I can't figure out how, by what, and whether it's likely to happen again. Can anyone shed any light or direct me to a good place to read about 'em?

You don't really need to read about .htaccess files, they're pretty obscure in the big picture. Although I'm sure someone can point out a great resource.

How long have you had your site? Files shouldn't suddenly appear out of nowhere, so it you're just starting to set things up, then this shouldn't come up again.

The .htaccess file is loaded every time anyone hits your site, and can do all kinds of things, like block a specific IP address, or redirect from one address to another. There's a custom "language" for dealing with it, and a lot of what you might do involves regular expressions. Not fun.

Anyway, not having one of these will probably not affect your site at all, except by making it a fraction of a second faster. No file should mean just serve up whatever page someone asks for.

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

Files shouldn't suddenly appear out of nowhere,

- that's why I was baffled. The site's been up for around a year. I've never seen anything there that wasn't put up by me until now and I really don't appreciate the host support's idea that something which throws people off my site was 'automatically generated'.

Kay G ,

May be you should paste the content of the htaccess in here.
This could help in finding what might cause it appearence.

The most probable reason could be if you enabled password protection are, hotlinking protection or... let se the code

Curiouser and curiouser - it says...

redirect 301 /eflorum http://www.eflorum.co.uk/forum/

... now that is the forum on my other website and I vaguely remember using a redirect because when I first set up I had both databases on the main website host ... but how it suddenly came up now, and why it gave page error rather than redirecting to the new forum I can't imagine. Off to do some more thinking!

if the site where the redirect is pointing is yours , than most probably you have place it somehow or maybe your host have loaded a previous backup without a notification

it might give errors as I think the syntax is not right.
This kind of redirect should look like
Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html


Another option is to place the htaccess inside /eflorum/ folder and set this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Yes - that's the confusing bit. I think the redirect was inside the eflorum file originally. But somehow, on Thursday night it wasn't - and so it stopped access until I removed it. I'm sure it was my fault now - it didn't appear by magic!! But I didn't go into my ftp that day - only discovered it when some of my club members emailed me and said they were getting a page error message.